Arrow, Flower, Fire

Starting from the information provided by The Meteoritical Society, which identifies 11 meteorite falls on the Romanian territory - from 1852 to 2008 - Lucian Bran's photographic project Săgeată, floare, foc. [Arrow, Flower, Fire.] proposes a fictional identification of this astronomical phenomenon: territorial geography becomes a hybrid, saturated by testimonies, histories, or images that transgress the logic of the predictable towards that of the poetic. The title of Bran’s photographic project is a verse from Lucian Blaga's poem, Atingere cereasca (1933).

If, traditionally, maps, coordinates, and reference systems index territories in order to subscribe them to a knowledge system, confined to a controllable space, in Lucian Bran's project the mapping of meteorites is nomadic, being rather the measure of an extended "social location," where fiction plays a central role. The spatial coordinates are hybridized, extending towards a fluid social and visual territory. The notion of "production of space" that underlies geographical theories - space is not inert, but it is actively produced by human activities, to the same extent that human activities are produced by the materiality of space - determines an oblique interpretation of geography.

Lucian Bran inscribes the materiality of meteorites into fictionality: experimental geography is thus generated, mapping the imaginary generated by the vertical geography of meteor fall, as well as the fictional context that contributes to the "production of space" in the visual field.